Farmers also operate on a thin budget, so if it increases their expenses they're likely to give it a pass, even if they approve of the idea.

OTOH, if this is cheap and easy to add, then it may be successful. Depending. How many farmers still grow their own feed? How many buy commercial feed? (OTOH, why are dairy cattle being fed corn? That's generally a bad idea. It's usually reserved for beef cattle being held in feed lots to put on fat.)

That said, my grandfather often added molasses to the alfalfa he fed his dairy cattle while milking them. So if it could be mixed into a formula of molasses, this stuff, and various other minerals it could easily be added, if not too expensive.

OTOH, my grandfather was operating on quite a small scale. (3 cows is the most I remember.) Perhaps the problems/benefits are different for larger operations.

sciencehabit writes: A simple supplement to a cow’s feed could substantially decrease a major source of methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas, a new study suggests. Each year worldwide, the methane produced by cud-chewing livestock warms Earth’s climate by the same amount as 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a little more than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity. That makes cows tempting targets for methane reduction efforts. In a new study, researchers added the chemical 3-nitrooxypropanol, also known as 3NOP, to the corn-and-alfalfa-based feed of 84 milk-producing Holsteins and monitored their methane production for 12 weeks—the largest and longest such trial of its type in lactating cows, the scientists say. For cows whose feed included 3NOP, methane emissions dropped, on average, by 30%.Link to Original Source

Is it even worthwhile to use an app like that to save a few cents on gas?

Not EVERY TIME you need to fill-up, but it's very good for finding which gas stations in your area are consistently inexpensive, which ones play games with pricing (occasionally cheap to bring-in business, then crank-up the prices). And when traveling it absolutely INVALUABLE for avoiding gas-traps that can be $1 per-gallon more than the gas station half a mile ahead...

If I have to spend even 5 minutes looking up gas prices and driving out of my way to go to a cheaper gas station, it's not worth saving 30 cents a gallon on gas.

Personally, there's nothing I would love more than an app (or maps/navigation feature) that would show me which cheap gas stations are along my route, rather than a dumb radius search that might tell me to do a U-turn and drive a 10 mile loop to save 1 cent/gallon, or going 5 miles away from the highway, when in both cases continuing on my route for 5 miles to the next cheap gas station is most often the far better option. GasBuddy's map is utterly useless for such things, and would take an hour of clicking-on each pin to figure out the answer to that simple and frequent question.

I see Gas Guru is a solid competitor to Gas Buddy. I'll have to compare their terms and see which is slightly less evil.

"Japan's economy was caught in a deflationary spiral for the past 20 years. It started in 1989, when the Bank of Japan raised interest rates causing the asset bubble in housing to burst. During that decade, the economy grew less than 2% per year as businesses cut back on debt, spending and lost productivity with excess workers (Japan's culture discourages employee layoffs). The Japanese people are also savers, and when they saw the signs of recession, they stopped spending and put away funds for bad times."

"Massive deflation helped turn a recession into The Great Depression. As unemployment rose, demand for goods and services fell. Prices dropped 10% a year. As prices fell, companies went out of business. More people became unemployed. When the dust settled, world trade essentially collapsed. The amount of goods and services traded fell 25%, but thanks to lower prices the value of this trade was down 65% (as measured in dollars)."

"As prices fall, people put off purchases, hoping they can get a better deal later. This puts pressure on manufacturers to constantly lower prices. Constant cost-cutting means lower wages and less investment spending."http://useconomy.about.com/od/...

A deflationary spiral is a vicious circle where decreases in price lead to lower production, which in turn leads to lower wages and demand, which leads to further decreases in price. The problem exacerbates its own cause.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You have no idea how this works, does you? How much you pay for a service has nothing to do with how much it costs to provide a service. It's a matter of how much the market will bear. Why else do you think there are rubes out there still paying for text messages?

In competitive markets what the market will bear is driven by the cost to provide the product. This is true even if you are required by law to by the product. The auto insurance market is very competitive ("15 minutes will save you...")

jazzdude00021 writes: No song has had as contentious of copyright history as "Happy Birthday." The song is nearly ubiquitous at birthday parties in the USA, and even has several translations with the same tune. Due to copyrights held by Warner Music, public performances have historically commanded royalty fees. However, a new lawsuit has been brought to prove that "Happy Birthday" is, and always has been in the public domain.The discovery phase for this lawsuit ended on July, 11 2014, yet this past week new evidence surfaced from Warner Music that may substantiate the claim that the lyrics were in the public domain long before the copyright laws changed in 1927. From the source:

And, here's the real kicker: they discovered this bit of evidence after two questionable things happened. (1) Warner/Chappell Music (who claims to hold the copyright for the publishing, if it exists) suddenly "found" a bunch of relevant documents that it was supposed to hand over in discovery last year, but didn't until just a few weeks ago, and (2) a rather important bit of information in one of those new documents was somewhat bizarrely "blurred out." This led the plaintiffs go searching for the original, and discover that it undermines Warner Music's arguments, to the point of showing that the company was almost certainly misleading the court. Furthermore, it definitively shows that the work was and is in the public domain.

Unless the zero day flaw was put there intentionally, as back doors are put there intentionally, a zero day flaw is not a back door, it's just some incompetent who should be employed asking me "Do you want fries with that?", rather than employed writing security sensitive software. In other words: your average bad programmer.

I think the implication of the story is that they are put in there intentionally, at least some of them.

Nicola Hahn writes: "The topic of key escrow encryption has once again taken center stage as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has spoken out against key escrow both at this year’s Aspen Security Forum and in an op-ed published recently by the Washington Post. However the debate over cryptographic back doors has a glaring blind spot. As the trove of leaks from Hacking Team highlights, most back doors are implemented using zero-day exploits. Keep in mind that the Snowden documents reveal cooperation across the tech industry, on behalf of the NSA, to make products that were "exploitable". Hence, there are people who question whether the whole discussion over key escrow includes an element of theater. Is it, among other things, a public relations gambit, in the wake of the PRISM scandal, intended to cast Silicon Valley companies as defenders of privacy?"Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: The German city of Munich has been looking for solutions to its traffic problem. Rush hour traffic is a problem, and public transit is near capacity. They think their best bet is to encourage (and enable) more people to hop on their bikes. Munich is now planning a Radschnellverbindungen — a highway system just for cyclists. Long bike routes will connect the city with universities, employment centers, and other cities. The paths themselves would be as free from disruptions as possible — avoiding intersections and traffic lights are key to a swift commute. They'll doubtless take lessons from Copenhagen's bike skyway: "Cykelslangen (pronounced soo-cool-klag-en) adds just 721 feet of length to the city’s 220 miles of bicycle paths, but it relieves congestion by taking riders over instead of through a waterfront shopping area."Link to Original Source

1) You don't "ask" a child molester to leave the kids alone. MS obviously wants more of a presence in the internet niche of the industry. They've allowed IE to become irrelevant for at least since 2009. They've wasted a ton of money on Edge's development, and MS needs something to make Windows 10 look like its a winner. Its a cheap way for MS to get new Windows 10 users to take a look at their new web browser, and its not like MS makes it impossible to go back to making chrome or an inferior 3rd party browser the default again.

2) Speaking as an actual firefox user, for some inexplicable reason, the CEO of firefox insists on releasing notably inferior web browsers from its previous versions at the beginning of 2015!!! They are slower than the firefox versions from the start of the year, and the older firefox versions were still noticeably slower than the competition. The only reason why the older versions were tolerable was that they weren't horribly slow like your current product! Now I frequently get odd moments when firefox seems to need to hit up the CPU, without browsing activity, and because the firefox code has such poorly implemented threading, the browser will seize up while waiting for firefox to resolve its background knitting! And that's on machines with an i7 desktop CPU, and 16GB of RAM!

3) Its a sign of extreme cluelessness when Beard thinks he can deflect from his failure as a CEO, and blame Microsoft for his incompetence. This isn't 2003; no one thinks of MS as the evil empire anymore; more like the asshole grandpa who still doesn't need a bedpan. How about securing patrons or a financing model after Google decided not to give you a free lunch anymore? How about not releasing new versions with new features that denigrate what little positive opinion firefox has left with its users?!?! Your CTO(?) had the right idea when he suggested chucking non-webkit code and starting from scratch. It sounds like unthinkable refactoring that would leave firefox dead in the water for a year, but at least you would retain your current user base!!! Instead of trying to build a McMansion on top of a crumbling foundation.

4) Since he doesn't code, the only constructive thing Beard can do at this point, is try to help find a CEO less incompetent than he is (preferably with a development background), or at least put a deadline on your resignation within 6 months, in order to force the board to find a replacement.

An anonymous reader writes: There are many style guides around the web talking about the coding best practices. Some guidelines are very interesting, some others are not suitable even they are recommended by known organisations.

The goal of the repository is to vote and comment the C/C++ coding best practices rules to have the most interesting ones and every C/C++ developer will focus more on the most voted rules.Link to Original Source